Caught Off Guard: The Value of Support
Well into our sixth month of support with our primary client. This last week, on Friday night, I got an out of the blue email asking me, "Exactly what does /name changed/ get for these dollars?" I took pause. My first thoughts were that our support model was so obvious that to even ask the question was tantamount to a direct vote of confidence on the services that we provide. I took a short walk and thought about it. Then I began to break the question down and take a less defensive posture. It's my job to 'sell' the benefits of a service we're providing, especially when the benefit itself is a concept. In our case, it's more of a 'hosting' solution, plus a concept (support), but none-the-less. I have to show the customer the direct benefit of the support contract in order for him to justify the expense. I feel good about the service that we provide though, we really do provide value and we are very ethical on our profit. Here is the model we are currently going with.
I began to realize that this question was a responsible question that should be expected of any manager spending dollars on a service is required to ask. It was my client simply doing his due diligence. Taking this new stance; I thought it might be useful to explore this question academically.
What is the true value of any support offering? Answer: Service Delivery.
It can be very difficult to demonstrate this value because like insurance, there is simply an agreement in place to deliver value when needed IF a set of conditions is met. This is exactly what we don't want to be because it's not lean. We see the entire industry moving away from this approach. The traditional monolith brick & mortar operations and infrastructure dichotomy is dying, and quickly at that. Lean, Agile, SaaS and now PaaS are the new black and we need to keep up with that.
So what should it look like? We have some ideas, but it is far from a passive "call us when you need us" system. Sure, exception systems like that scale nicely, but we believe that most organizations simply won't tolerate that because of the sense of a lack of value add. It doesn't make people feel good inside anymore. So,... We need to do more to meet the customer's need. We need to embrace more of a continuous integration, continuous delivery model. We need to build trust and provide verification to the client. We need to let them know we are operations and the lights are on all night. ~ The great thing is that we have all the tools required to provide the proper feedback loops, dashboards, email notifications, and sms & mms messaging notifications. To name a few...
Ranger, New Relic, Papertrail, SendGrid, Intercom, Librato, Graphite, HoneyBadger, AirBrake, Blitz, and Exceptional.
Virtual Operations and Infrastructure Center
Banked hours for support & operations activities
Service Level Agreement (Very critical!)
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